Affairs To Remember
by George Christy
Nob Hill Gazette
May 2006

“Every city should have a Monday Group, as they have in San Francisco for authors and artists,” sighed Erica Jong, during her visit to the West Coast, with stops in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Seattle. “We were at the Big Four, everyone sitting at a long table with 40-plus convivial luncheon guests, both men and women discussing books, the arts, politics, whatever, which they do every month or so.” Others who’ve been invited by Diana Dalton of the 11-year-old Monday Group range from Vanity Fair’s iconoclastic Christopher Hitchens to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, to Michael Tilson Thomas.

Flying South from San Francisco to speak at Andrea Grossman’s lecture series
at the Skirball Center, Erica visited with Jim Burrows and his newlywed wife  Debbie -- Jim’s the mastermind behind Cheers, Frasier, etc. He’s the cousin of Erica’s fourth husband, the “cockeyed optimist” divorce attorney Ken Burrows, with Jim being the son of Abe Burrows, the late Broadway playwright (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), and Ken the son of Abe’s brother. Erica & Ken have been wed 17 years, and on their 10th anniversary, surrounded by best friends, they set fire to her pre-nup in a wok.

Erica’s fame was launched at age 31 when her fearless autobiographical novel, Fear of Flying, was published in 1973 to blockbuster sales (at last count, 18 million worldwide in 27 languages), and continues to lure readers with its sexual odysseys, which were revelatory shockers at the time, notably the “zipless f.” John Updike wrote an ecstatic review in the New Yorker, and Paul Theroux called her heroine Isadora Wing “a mammoth pudenda.”

Erica was on the West Coast in behalf of Seducing the Demon: Writing for My
Life, a compelling, many-splendored look-back at the ups, downs and centers of her life, an unlayering of buried truths from her past that her editor Ken Siman kept probing for -- no holding back on encounters, sexual and otherwise, good and bad. “Ken’s the best editor I’ve had,” says Erica. “He’d read a chapter and tell me to dig deeper, tell more. And he was right every time.” Writing, she avers, is her life, having penned nine novels, volumes of poetry and remembrances.

In Seducing the Demon, she quotes Amos Oz, that writers and people can be killed “like ants,” but not books. “However systemically you try to destroy them, there’s always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere.”

And during our meeting, among the many we’ve enjoyed over the years, Erica talked about Georgette Mosbacher, a drop-dead red-haired beauty born in Indiana whom we’ve known for three decades, and who hosted a book party at her Fifth Avenue apartment for Erica. “Although we’re on opposite pages politically, Georgette being a hard-working Republican, we love one another. She’s quite fabulous.”

We recalled our own friendship with Georgette, and seeing her through various
husbands, including her first, Los Angeles developer Bob Muir, which was when we became friends, and second husband Fabergé tycoon George Barrie. Her last, from whom she’s divorced, was Bob Mosbacher, Secretary of Commerce under President George H.W. Bush, with Georgette becoming one of the Beltway’s sought-after hostesses. Years ago Ambassador to Luxembourg’s “hostest with the
mostest” Perle Mesta tattled that, “All you need to do is hang a lamb chop out the window and the Washington powerhouses will break their necks running.”

Erica always asks after her friend, Gore Vidal, with whom she’s politically in sync, who’s returned to his hacienda in the Hollywood Hills, having sold his lush estate in Ravello now that he’s lost his devoted companion of decades, Howard Austin -- Gore having undergone hip surgery and “unable to stroll” through his gardens. We reminisced about Howard, who couldn’t do enough for Gore and was a fine chef, with Italian cuisine his specialty.

Like Gore, Erica says she’s pro same-sex marriage -- “the Bill of Rights does not prevent people from the right to love; you can’t deny citizens their civil rights, whatever their sexuality, including their right to marry and enjoy child custody,”

A world-traveler, who’s lived in Venice year after year and now resides between Manhattan and Connecticut, Erica’s fallen in love with India. She & Ken and several couples plan holidays there, and she’s reread H.M. Forster’s Passage to India and contemporary Indian writers such as Vikram Seth and Jumpha Lahiri and Arundati Roy.

“Our trips are transporting; our problems seem so minor when you see what’s there. Yes, the roads are terrible, but our guides are lovely, and, yes, you run into camels and elephants, yet you sense such a humanity; you love the people and how they get along. Our travel agent books us into hotels as grand as the Crillon and Ritz in Paris, possibly more luxurious.”

Critics reviewing Seducing the Demon have mentioned her one-night-stand with
Martha Stewart’s publisher husband, Andy, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which
Martha blames on wrecking her marriage, and which Erica discusses candidly, but as any adult knows, it takes two to fox-trot. “I wish I had the sexual power she attributes to me.” And she doesn’t shy away from describing other shags (Italian lover Leonello “had a grace that all Don Juans might envy . . . a slow seducer, slow to bed and slow to finish”).

She imagines an assignation with President Clinton -- “guess I’ll stand in line, I’m hardly the only one who finds him sexy . . . even after open-heart surgery, he has more life force that most men of any age. Life force is the ultimate sex appeal.”

Erica recalls the Hollywood nightmare of working with the late cocaine-fueled
producer Julia Phillips, who wanted to film Fear of Flying, and Erica’s subsequent lawsuit. She confesses her DUI arrest in Beverly Hills, spending a night in jail, shares experiences with her 27-year-old writer-daughter Molly Jong-Fast, whose father is Erica’s former husband Jonathan Fast, son of author Howard Fast. And she delves openly into Molly’s drug addiction and her re-hab rescue -- how she bribed Molly with a $12,000 check, the gift allowable by the IRS without a tax payment, to visit her grandmother, who complained that Molly had gotten too fat. She was pregnant, with Erica devoted to grandson Max, who’s now two.

Grandmothers and mothers can be tough for writers, she says. “Jewish mothers
want you to write nice things about the Jews, why make them look bad. And
Catholic mothers are the same -- don’t criticize the Pope, our religion has been
persecuted, so please write nice things. All of which conflicts with a writer’s emotional makeup and respect for their experiences.”

Seducing the Demon is not to be missed, for Erica’s fearless embrace of the
truth, and let’s commend Joel Fotinos, her publisher at Jeremy P.

Tarcher/Penguin who will publish all of Erica’s books in uniform editions. “A writer’s dream come true,” she says, and quotes Arthur Miller that, “When life
disappointed me, I always had my writing.” Writing isn’t a choice, she adds, but a
need. Her next novel will feature her Fear of Flying heroine Isadora Wing
approaching “the big 6-0.”

When Barbra Streisand asked Erica why she always remarried, Erica responded,
“You gotta trust somebody, Barbra.” And then Erica reflected that, “Trusting yourself to trust somebody is key.” Other Erica reflections: “Genius is the ultimate aphrodisiac . . . pornography is the massage parlor of literature . . . open marriage is a crock . . . famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included . . . No one has ever bettered Hemingway’s description of literary New York: a jar of tapeworms feeding on each other.”

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